The great adventure of the Coalition Ministry, the deed by which it hoped to justify its existence, and by which indeed it has earned its only honorable title to remembrance, was the bill which is known to the world as Fox's India Bill. If the extending influence of England in India was a source of pride to the English people, it was also a source of grave responsibility. The conditions under which that influence was exercised, the weaknesses and inadequacies of the system by which the East India Company exercised its semi-regal authority, were becoming more apparent with every succeeding year to the small but steadily increasing number of persons who took a serious and intelligent interest in Indian affairs. A series of events, to be referred to later, had served to force into a special prominence the difficulties and the dangers of the existing state of affairs and to fasten the attention of thinkers upon the evils that had resulted, and the evils that must yet result from its continuance. To mitigate those evils in the present, and to minimize them in the future, Fox, inspired and aided by Burke's splendid knowledge of Indian affairs, worked out a measure which was confidently expected to substitute order for disorder and reason for unreason. In the November of 1783, Pitt addressed a challenge to the Ministry calling upon them to bring forward some measure securing and improving the advantages to be derived from England's Eastern possessions, some measure not of temporary palliation and timorous expedients, but vigorous and effectual, suited to the magnitude, the importance, and the alarming exigencies of the case. Fox answered this challenge by asking leave to bring in a bill "for vesting the affairs of the East India Company in the hands of certain commissioners for the benefit of the proprietors and the public." At the same time Fox asked leave to bring in another bill "for the better government of the territorial possessions and dependencies in India." These two bills, supplementing each other, formed, in the opinion of those who framed and who advocated them, a simple, efficient, and responsible plan for the better administration of England's Indian {231} dependencies. However tentative and incomplete they may now appear as a means of dealing with a problem of such vast importance and such far-reaching consequences, they certainly were measures the adoption of which must have proved a gain to the country governing and to the country governed.
[Sidenote: 1783—Fox and the affairs of India]
The measures, which, it is probable, were originally planned out by Burke, but to which it is certain that Fox devoted all the strength of his intellect and all the enthusiasm of his nature, were of a daring and comprehensive character. The first proposed to make a clean sweep of the existing state of things in India by the appointment of a Board composed of seven commissioners to whom absolute authority over the East India Company's property, and over the appointment or removal of holders of offices in India, was to be intrusted for a term of four years. This term of four years was not to be affected by any changes of administration that might occur in England during the time. The commerce of the Company was to be managed by a council of directors, who were themselves entirely under the control of the seven commissioners. The commissioners and the directors were required to lay their accounts before the proprietors every six months, and before both Houses at the beginning of every session. The commissioners were in the first instance to be appointed by Parliament, that is to say, by the Ministry headed by Fox and North; at the end of the four years they were to be appointed by the Crown. The Court of Proprietors was to fill up the vacancies in the council of directors. The second and less important measure dealt with the powers of the Governor-General and Council and the conduct to be observed towards the princes and natives of India.
The first measure was the measure of paramount importance, the measure from which Fox and his friends hoped so much, the measure which aroused in a very peculiar degree the anger of the King and of the King's followers. They saw in a moment the enormous influence that the passing of the measure would place in the hands of Fox. The names of the commissioners were left blank {232} in the bill, but when their time came to be filled up in committee they were all filled with the names of followers of Fox. It was argued that were the bill to become law a set of persons extremely obnoxious to the King would have in their hands for a solid term of years the entire administration of India and the control of an amount of patronage, estimated at not less than three hundred thousand a year. This would enable them to oppose to the royal prerogative of patronage an influence of like nature that brought with it scarcely less than royal power. It is scarcely surprising that Pitt should have employed all his eloquence and all his energy against what he described as "the boldest and most unconstitutional measure ever attempted, transferring at one stroke, in spite of all charters and compacts, the immense patronage and influence of the East to Charles Fox in or out of office."
[Sidenote: 1783—Henry Dundas and James Sayer]
If Pitt was the most conspicuous opponent of the India Bills, only less conspicuous was a man who, though much Pitt's senior, was still young, and who had already made himself prominent in the House of Commons, not merely as a politician of general ability, but as one who took a special interest in the affairs of India. Henry Dundas had been a characteristic ornament of the Scottish bar, at once a skilful lawyer and an attractive man of the world when, eight years before the existence of the Coalition Ministry, he had come to St. Stephen's as Lord Advocate. An ambition to shine as a statesman and an extraordinary power of application had equipped him with the varied information that enabled him to assert himself as an authority in many departments of national business. He had early recognized the importance of India as a field for the powers of a rising politician, and he had devoted to India and to Indian affairs that tireless assiduity which permitted him at once to appear a convivial spirit with the temperament and leisure of a man of pleasure, and a master of profound and intricate subjects, the secret of which was only known to those who were acquainted with his habit of early rising and his indefatigable capacity for work in the time that he allotted to work. When the public attention was {233} directed to India, towards the close of the American war, and when a very general sense of indignation was aroused by the mismanagement that lessened and that threatened to destroy British influence in the East, Dundas came forward with the confident air of one who was intimately acquainted with the complicated problem and who believed himself perfectly competent to set all difficulties right. He was the chairman of the select committee of the House of Commons appointed to inquire into the causes of the war in the Carnatic, and he impressed himself upon the House as an authority upon India of no mean order, both in the report from that committee and in a bill which he himself introduced for the purpose of dealing with the Indian question. He did not succeed in carrying his measure, but he took care that his knowledge of his subject increased in proportion to its growing importance in the public view, and his ready eloquence and specious show of information made him a very valuable ally for Pitt and a fairly formidable opponent to Fox in the heady debates over the measures to which the political honor of the dishonorable coalition was pledged.
The India Bill had a more serious enemy than Dundas, a more serious enemy than Pitt so far as the immediate effect of enmity upon public opinion is to be estimated. There was an attorney in London named James Sayer whose private means enabled him to neglect his profession and devote himself to the production of political caricatures and squibs. Sayer was one of the many who believed in the rising star of Pitt, and he proved his belief by the publication of a caricature which Fox himself is said to have admitted gave the India Bill its severest blow in public estimation. This caricature was called "Carlo Khan's Triumphal Entry into Leadenhall Street." It represented Fox in the grotesque attire of a theatrical Oriental potentate, and with a smile of conquest upon his black-haired face, perched upon an elephant with the staring countenance of Lord North, that was led by Burke, whose spectacled acridity was swollen with the blowing of a trumpet from which depended a map of India. The {234} caricature was ingenious, timely, and extraordinarily efficacious in harming the measure and its champions. It had an enormous sale; it was imitated and pirated far and wide. It carried to all parts of the kingdom the conviction that Fox was aiming at nothing less than a dictatorship of India, and it intensified the general animosity towards the measures and the men of the Coalition Ministry more effectively than any amount of speeches in Westminster could have done. But it had no more power to weaken the solid majority of the Ministry in the House of Commons than the hurried erudition of Dundas, or than what Walpole called the "Bristol stone" of Pitt's eloquence as contrasted with the "diamond reason" of Fox's solid sense. Neither political caricature nor popular disapproval, neither the indignation of the King nor the opulence of the fearful and furious East India Company, could prevent Fox from carrying his measures in the House of Commons by means of the sheer force of numbers that he had obtained by his unhallowed compact with North.
But the power of the new Ministry was vulnerable in another place where the most unconstitutional weapons were employed against it. The King was eager to avenge the affront that had, as he conceived, been put upon him by the compulsion that had forced him to accept ministers so little to his taste. He was prepared to stick at little in order to retaliate upon his enemies, as he always conceived those men to be who ventured to cross his purposes. Nothing could be done effectively to change the political composition of the Lower House; something could be essayed with the reasonable hope of modifying the composition of the Upper House. Lord Temple, a second-rate statesman, whose position gave him almost first-rate importance, was the instrument by which the King was able to bring very effective pressure upon the peers. George wrote a letter to Lord Temple in which he declared that he should deem those who should vote for Fox's measure as "not only not his friends, but his enemies;" and he added that if Lord Temple could put this in stronger words "he had full authority to do so." With this amazing document in his {235} possession Lord Temple went from one noble lord to another, pointing out the unwisdom of each in pursuing a course which would constitute him an avowed enemy of the King, and insisting upon the advantages that must follow from the taking of the very broad hint of the royal pleasure thus conveyed. Temple's arguments, backed by and founded upon the King's letter, had the most satisfactory result from the King's point of view. Peer after peer fell away from the doomed Ministry; peer after peer hastened to prove himself one of the elect, to assert himself as a King's friend by recording his vote against the obnoxious measure.
[Sidenote: 1783—Fall of the Coalition Ministry]
The course of action inspired by the King and acted upon by Lord Temple was flagrantly unconstitutional even in an age which permitted to the sovereign so much liberty of personal intervention in affairs. It was, however, attended with complete success. The India Bills were rejected in the House of Lords by a majority of nineteen, and this defeat, which would not have been regarded in more recent times as fatal to a Ministry, however fatal for the time being to the measure thus condemned, was instantly used by the King as a pretext for ridding himself of the advisers whose advice he detested. The King resolved to dismiss the ministers, and to dismiss them with every circumstance of indignity that should render their dismissal the more contemptuous. On the midnight of the day following the final defeat of the measure in the House of Lords a messenger delivered to the two Secretaries of State, Fox and North, a message from the King stating that it was his Majesty's will and pleasure that they should deliver to him the seals of their respective offices, and that they should send them by the Under-Secretaries, Mr. Frazer and Mr. Nepean, as a personal interview on the occasion would be disagreeable to the King. The seals were immediately sent to Buckingham House and were promptly handed over by the King to Lord Temple, who on the following day sent letters of dismissal to the other members of the Cabinet Council.